The Pirate Bay Co-Founder, Peter Sunde, has started a new project which will provide a decentralized p2p based DNS system. This is a direct result of the increasing control which the US government has over ICANN.

As long as there is a centralized root, there is always the possibility of interference from government and other agencies. To counter this threat what Peter Sunde is suggesting is a new Domain Name System based on peer to peer technology. Such a system will be completely decentralized and hence almost impossible for the government or any other agencies to control.

The P2P-DNS is the name of the project which aims to do this. According to the project’s wiki, this is how the project is described:

P2P-DNS is a community project that will free internet users from imperial control of DNS by ICANN. In order to prevent unjust prosecution or denial of service, P2P-DNS will operate as a distributed and less centralized service hosted by the users of DNS. Temporary substitutes, (as Alpha and Beta developments), are being made ready for deployment. A network with no centralized points of failure, (per the original design of the internet), remains our goal. P2P-DNS is developing rapidly.

This system will work only with a .p2p TLD, other TLDs will be passed through to be handled by the default DNS server. This is stated in the project’s goal as:

Create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the host's DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other requests cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.

While the idea of a completely decentralized internet free from the government’s interference is a very tempting one, it is not without its own sets of problems. One of them has to do with trust. With the current setup, we are putting our trust in the DNS servers like OpenDNS, Google DNS etc. to point us to the right direction when we want to access a website. With the scheme that P2P-DNS is proposing, we will have to rely on others in the network to direct us. It is one thing to trust OpenDNS, Google etc. but completely another thing to do the same with a random computer. Such a system is also harder to secure and tends to be slower.

This is not the first time that an alternative Domain Name System has been proposed. Starting with AlterNIC in 1997, alternative DNS has had a controversial history. Many have ceased to function now because of the lack of adoption from users. However, coming right after the controversial seizure of 80 domains by the US government, P2P-DNS might just get enough support to make it a success.